Speaker 1: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.
Speaker 2: When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
Speaker 1: And when I find my ball in Egg.
Speaker 3: Friday, Egg, Frida Egg Friday, Fridagg.
Speaker 4: Bride, Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of
Speaker 4: the course. Welcome back to another edition of the Frida
Speaker 4: Egg Golf Podcast. I am Andy Johnson, but this is
Speaker 4: not my episode. This is actually Garrett's podcast. He's on
Speaker 4: a doctor ordered vocal rest, so I'm subbing in just
Speaker 4: for the intro and the and the advertisements from our partners.
Speaker 4: I would, uh, you know, I'd say that a vocal
Speaker 4: ordered rest is one of the worst things that could
Speaker 4: happen to a podcaster. I think I'm starting to think
Speaker 4: about injuries that can derail my life, and something with
Speaker 4: my vocal cords would be a problem. So anyway, this
Speaker 4: is an exciting series. I haven't listened to this podcast
Speaker 4: and I am quite excited to listen to it. It
Speaker 4: was an idea Garrett had and I'm fascinated about the
Speaker 4: topics of this is he wanted to do a short
Speaker 4: series over this holiday break and maybe into early next
Speaker 4: year on a few of the greatest and most influential
Speaker 4: golf courses in the world. So naturally, the first course
Speaker 4: up is the Old Course at Saint Andrew's. So he's
Speaker 4: going to go into depth on the Old Course, i think,
Speaker 4: on the history and architecture of it. His guest for
Speaker 4: this episode is Scott McPherson. Scott is a golf course
Speaker 4: architect and historian and he's the author of the book
Speaker 4: Saint Andrews The Evolution of the Old Course. So Scott
Speaker 4: just came out with a new edition of the book
Speaker 4: and you can purchase a copy of your own at
Speaker 4: Scott McPherson Golfdesign dot com. That's Scott McPherson Golfdesign dot com.
Speaker 4: So we're gonna get to this interview, but first let's
Speaker 4: talk about our partner, Fat Cork.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: Fat Cork is a you know, much like the Old Course,
Speaker 4: like a wonderful you know, champagne that's super unique and
Speaker 4: a kind of a pilgrimage. If you're into champagne, or
Speaker 4: if you know somebody that's into champagne, you should be
Speaker 4: getting them Fat Cork. We're here in the holiday season.
Speaker 4: There's a couple of things. You should have a nice
Speaker 4: little stock of champagne, for your holiday parties. If if
Speaker 4: you're going to holiday parties, it's an awesome host gift.
Speaker 4: And then also if you or a loved one love champagne,
Speaker 4: a great holiday gift is Fat Quirk's membership. They are
Speaker 4: golf lovers over at Fat Cork. The unique value prop
Speaker 4: of Fat Cork is that they get their champagne from
Speaker 4: the growers directly. So think about craft beer, you know,
Speaker 4: craft coffee. This is really like craft champagne. They come
Speaker 4: from the growers. These are the most unique grapes you
Speaker 4: can get, and you know, with the membership, you can
Speaker 4: get you know, a denomination of bottles based off how
Speaker 4: much you want. You know, they have three tiers shipped
Speaker 4: to your house every quarter. This makes an awesome gift.
Speaker 4: If you join the Champagne Club now you will be
Speaker 4: you know, and use the promo code golf. You'll get
Speaker 4: a bunch of goodies. You'll get a cork like a
Speaker 4: cork Seamus headcover, a couple stoppers which are awesome stoppers.
Speaker 4: They make the best stoppers on the market that I've
Speaker 4: ever used, as well as a bottle sleeve that like
Speaker 4: if you want to go on a picnic with a
Speaker 4: champagne bottle. This thing's perfect. You don't have to bring
Speaker 4: a cooler, you just have to use the sleeve. So
Speaker 4: that's for the club. And if you're just looking for bottles,
Speaker 4: if you want some bottles for whether it's New Year's
Speaker 4: you know, go to fatcork dot com use the promo
Speaker 4: code golf and you get free shipping on your order.
Speaker 4: So that's not significant. You know, you're talking twenty to
Speaker 4: eighty dollars for free shipping and they are. They're great people,
Speaker 4: awesome customer service. Fatcork dot com. That's f A T.
Speaker 4: C O r K dot com and thank you for
Speaker 4: their support. Now let's get to Scott McPherson.
Speaker 3: All right, So Scott, your book is this incredibly detailed
Speaker 3: account of the Old Courses evolution. How did you first
Speaker 3: get familiar with Saint Andrews and then what prompted you
Speaker 3: to dive so deeply into the history like this.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm a fan of the Old Course like everybody
Speaker 2: else you know, and and a visitor in many ways
Speaker 2: like everybody else. My grandparents were Scottish and they had
Speaker 2: immigrated to New Zealand, and my dad was born in
Speaker 2: New Zealand and we come back, Okay to Scotland, and
Speaker 2: I think in the eighties I came with mom and
Speaker 2: dad and you know, we got to the first tea
Speaker 2: and you know, I was a teenager at that point
Speaker 2: and there wasn't the chance to play that that particular day.
Speaker 2: But I think a little spark that when I got
Speaker 2: to the university age St Andrews as a university was
Speaker 2: kind of on my radar. It wasn't going to happen,
Speaker 2: but it was on my radar as a you know,
Speaker 2: this dream opportunity possibility. So I think I've always had
Speaker 2: a knowledge of Scotland and of St Andrews, and you know,
Speaker 2: when I decided that I really wanted to get into
Speaker 2: the golf design industry, I went to university. I did
Speaker 2: a horticulture degree, and I won a scholarship and went
Speaker 2: to California and UC Davison did landscape architecture, which was great,
Speaker 2: particularly the environmental side of golf course design, which is
Speaker 2: which is what I was interested in then and still
Speaker 2: am now thirty years later. I ended up my first,
Speaker 2: I guess, real job. My parents were on a farm
Speaker 2: and I designed a pass three on the farm and
Speaker 2: all that sort of stuff. But The first sort of
Speaker 2: real job was working for Peter Thompson, five times Open
Speaker 2: champion in Melbourne in Australia, and you know it was
Speaker 2: great and he's an incredible man. Was an incredible man,
Speaker 2: a great ambassador, I mean obviously a great player, but
Speaker 2: very warm human being. And you know, he had a
Speaker 2: house in St Andrew's. He designed the links the Duke's
Speaker 2: Course in St Andrews, and so there was a number
Speaker 2: of conversations in the office around about St Andrew's and
Speaker 2: you know, it just kept reinforcing it in my mind
Speaker 2: that I really need to go back. So there was
Speaker 2: a dip in the fortunes of the Peter Thompson Design Company,
Speaker 2: mainly because we had a lot of work in Malaysia
Speaker 2: and there was sort of a dip in I think
Speaker 2: there was a coup in the in the mid nineties,
Speaker 2: and so I was one of the young guys and
Speaker 2: you know it was sort of put to me that
Speaker 2: maybe this is a good time to do some traveling.
Speaker 2: I thought, yeah, actually, maybe this is a good time
Speaker 2: to do some traveling and go to St Andrews. So
Speaker 2: Peter very kindly wrote me a letter saying, look, if
Speaker 2: you get to St Andrew's call the RNA. A friend
Speaker 2: of mine is the second through the RNA. Michael Banellick
Speaker 2: very recently passed away, very sadly. That was obviously discern
Speaker 2: Michael Banellick. Now anyway, so I do this, so I,
Speaker 2: you know, this kid in a candy store right rock
Speaker 2: and to St. Andrews with this letter in my hand,
Speaker 2: called the RNA and say, look, you know, can I
Speaker 2: have a meeting with Michael Banellick? You know an introduction
Speaker 2: by Peter Thompson. Sure, and Michael was incredible. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: next week, come on down to the RNA and in
Speaker 2: the trophy room there, sit down and he said, you know,
Speaker 2: what would you like to do. And I said, I'd
Speaker 2: like to stay in design if possible. And he said, well, actually,
Speaker 2: they're planning on building a new golf course just up
Speaker 2: the road. You know, I might be able to get
Speaker 2: you introduced to the people doing it. They're here for
Speaker 2: a meeting next week. And it was actually, you know,
Speaker 2: Jean Sarason turned up. So once I knew Jean Sarason
Speaker 2: was going to turn up, I went down to one
Speaker 2: of the local bookstores and bought, you know, thirty years
Speaker 2: of Championship golf, and you know I couldn't wait to
Speaker 2: meet him because he invented the sandwich.
Speaker 1: In credible guy.
Speaker 2: So took this reprinted version and got him to sign
Speaker 2: it and got to meet the new developer and the
Speaker 2: new architect, an American guy called Dennis Griffiths.
Speaker 1: And they said, hey, this is cool.
Speaker 2: You know, we don't know if we're going to get
Speaker 2: permits to build the golf course, but you know, what
Speaker 2: are your plans? And I said, well, you know, I'm
Speaker 2: going to stay around for a bit. I had a
Speaker 2: New Zealand friend who was doing his PhD at s
Speaker 2: Andrew's University, and so.
Speaker 1: I thought, well stay for a bit, and you know,
Speaker 1: threw all.
Speaker 2: My eggs into one basket, thinking if this, if this
Speaker 2: comes off, you know, it's a dream come true. So
Speaker 2: you know, it took a little over a year to
Speaker 2: get the planning permits and then I was offered the
Speaker 2: job as the on site architect for the two golf
Speaker 2: courses at s Andrew's which is is now the Fairmont
Speaker 2: and Andrews. It was s and Andrew's Bay back in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety nine when I started on site. But in
Speaker 2: that in that year, the intervening year. You know, I
Speaker 2: had to doing some money, right, So my New Zealand
Speaker 2: friends said, hey, do what we do. Just caddy on
Speaker 2: the old course. You know, it's easy. And I had
Speaker 2: done a little bit of cadding on the Australian tour,
Speaker 2: so I was capable of blacking a background a residential
Speaker 2: caddying and two caddying, you know, two very different things.
Speaker 2: And you know, you sort of going around and we're
Speaker 2: doing sort of eleven ten or eleven rounds a week.
Speaker 2: You know, I think I ended up doing about three
Speaker 2: hundred rounds. And you know, you go round around often
Speaker 2: with different caddies, but there would be caddies that you'd
Speaker 2: see again and again and they'd tell very similar stories
Speaker 2: and I hope to ingratiate themselves with whoever their player
Speaker 2: was to get a bigger tip at the end of it.
Speaker 2: In fact, Tip Anderson, you know, legendary caddy, was one
Speaker 2: of the caddies that were still alive at the time,
Speaker 2: and I did a few looks with him. Unfortunately, his
Speaker 2: caddy notes so I think Palmer is one of the
Speaker 2: things in the book. He gave me a time. But
Speaker 2: the caddies would say, you know, all the bunkers were
Speaker 2: made by sheep, and you know, these things have never changed.
Speaker 2: And you know the railway was put in and make
Speaker 2: up a year, you know, and I'm thinking this isn't right,
Speaker 2: you know, this is just been with Peter Thompson. And
Speaker 2: I had a great library in Melbourne. I was going
Speaker 2: through all through the books, thinking, of course has changed
Speaker 2: quite a bit, but I had no proof. So you know,
Speaker 2: once the winter months came along, I sort of went
Speaker 2: into the different libraries and I bought different books and
Speaker 2: I started put together a spreadsheet thinking I've got to
Speaker 2: try and track all the lengths of all the holes,
Speaker 2: and I thought the only one I could do it
Speaker 2: was really the Open Championship, the first one being eighteen
Speaker 2: seventy two, is it right?
Speaker 1: And eighteen seventy three, seventy three? Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was just going to say, it's one of those
Speaker 3: seventy one, seventy two, seventy three, one of those.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah it's And I'm thinking there's got to
Speaker 2: be there has to be quite a lot of change here.
Speaker 2: But I needed to be able to prove it. So
Speaker 2: I started with that first Open and went through and
Speaker 2: tried to get.
Speaker 1: Eighteen seventy three.
Speaker 2: All the opens that very early years, there was not
Speaker 2: much information, in fact, no information. You know, they'd tracked
Speaker 2: the results, but they wouldn't track the course changes. And
Speaker 2: it wasn't really until I got into the eighteen nineties
Speaker 2: there was sort of an inkling of how whole longs,
Speaker 2: how long the holes were. In eighteen ninety five it
Speaker 2: became really clear that was the first open where they
Speaker 2: had the whole lengths, and certainly by nineteen hundred they
Speaker 2: had it.
Speaker 1: So I filled out all this.
Speaker 2: Spreadsheet and I started to notice certain periods where there
Speaker 2: was very deliberate change, and I thought, hang on, I
Speaker 2: have to two or three yards didn't feel like deliberate,
Speaker 2: so I made up eleven yards if I'd noticed there
Speaker 2: was eleven yards more or less, because actually holes were
Speaker 2: getting shorter sometimes as well. I started a color code
Speaker 2: these whole changes once I went through all the opens,
Speaker 2: and this was up until because the first, the first
Speaker 2: dish of the book came out two thousand and seven,
Speaker 2: so I really could only get to the two thousand
Speaker 2: and five open. Once I got them, I noticed really
Speaker 2: deliberate changes around certain periods, and they all linked interestingly
Speaker 2: enough to changes in technology, mainly golf ball, and so
Speaker 2: you could see all of a sudden there was a
Speaker 2: direct correlation between technology and the expansion of the old course.
Speaker 2: And I thought that was I thought that was pretty interesting.
Speaker 2: And I don't think it had been seen before, certainly
Speaker 2: not in the way that I tried to document it.
Speaker 2: And you know, I had no intention to write a book.
Speaker 2: That was the irony of this whole process. It was
Speaker 2: really only for me to prove to myself that there
Speaker 2: had been significant changes over this period. And a couple
Speaker 2: of people found out about it, and George Peppo, who's
Speaker 2: a you know, American, wrote he lived in St. Andrews,
Speaker 2: actually on the side of the eighteenth Fairway, and so
Speaker 2: he became interested in a couple of the journalists who
Speaker 2: were writing getting ready for the two thousand and five Open,
Speaker 2: so they were starting to use my research for their
Speaker 2: newspapers or for Peter Alice used it for the Open itself.
Speaker 2: So and they then encouraged me to into a book,
Speaker 2: which was great on one level, but you know, ended
Speaker 2: up being another two year project and endless out. I
Speaker 2: was a sleep sleepless nights trying to combine it altogether.
Speaker 2: But I became kind of determined to try and find
Speaker 2: a way to make to show this in a way
Speaker 2: that was easy to read and easy to understand, in
Speaker 2: a book that had all the great plans.
Speaker 1: You know. I obviously for a day job, we'd.
Speaker 2: Draw plans, and there's so many great plans of the
Speaker 2: Old Course that I wanted to have a book that
Speaker 2: showed all those And it was a very visual book
Speaker 2: because you can easily get bogged down in the numbers
Speaker 2: with st Andrews, So I wanted it to look like
Speaker 2: a coffee table book, but effectively to be a research
Speaker 2: piece for people who really wanted to do a deep
Speaker 2: dive into the evolution of the Old Course. And that's
Speaker 2: where the name came from, because it tracks the evolution
Speaker 2: both with and length and the physical changes mainly spurred
Speaker 2: on due to technology over a key two hundred period.
Speaker 2: So the first map of the Old Course was eighteen
Speaker 2: twenty one, and that's really where the book starts, and
Speaker 2: it goes now with this new edition, it goes up
Speaker 2: to well, actually really it goes up to twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: That follows the open up to last year, and then
Speaker 2: there's bits that happened post open that are also included
Speaker 2: in the book.
Speaker 3: That's the short version, the short version of how the
Speaker 3: book came to be. Now, that's all very interesting. Why
Speaker 3: don't we dig into a little bit of the history.
Speaker 3: As you say, the book really properly starts in eighteen
Speaker 3: twenty one, I believe it is with one of the
Speaker 3: first really detailed or informative plans of the Old Course,
Speaker 3: or it was not then called the Old Course, of course,
Speaker 3: it is Saint Andrew's Lynks or some version of that,
Speaker 3: or pillmore links. But in any case, I'd like to
Speaker 3: maybe start with a general sketch of what the course
Speaker 3: was like in its very early days. I know there's
Speaker 3: not much evidence, but just briefly, if you could take
Speaker 3: me back to the beginnings of golf in Saint Andrews,
Speaker 3: how early was the game play on those lengths and
Speaker 3: what information do we have about what the course was
Speaker 3: like in its early pre nineteenth century days.
Speaker 2: There's not a lot of information, and I guess one
Speaker 2: of the things that I've tried to do in this
Speaker 2: book is be quite factual, because it's really easy to
Speaker 2: get into writing about things without great information.
Speaker 3: Speculation and romance and generalities about what the course was
Speaker 3: like in the seventeen hundreds. We know though that it
Speaker 3: went from twenty two to eighteen holes. That's one thing
Speaker 3: that kind of happened in this period.
Speaker 2: Yeah, correct, So that's in the mid seventeen hundreds, So
Speaker 2: it's quite a long way before the first map came along.
Speaker 2: I think we know that the Gulf was very hard,
Speaker 2: that the course is very difficult. You know, there was
Speaker 2: no concept of fairways. It was all through the green.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's really it's interesting terminology when you dip into that
Speaker 2: sort of stuff, because I could talk to people today
Speaker 2: and say, well, you know, there weren't fairways. What do
Speaker 2: you mean they weren't fairways? You know, there weren'ts you know,
Speaker 2: what do you mean? There were moas well? It was
Speaker 2: I mean there was sheep on the golf course until
Speaker 2: nineteen forty six, you know, I think there was postcards
Speaker 2: still being put out with images of sheep. So the
Speaker 2: game has come and the golf course has come so
Speaker 2: far that it's very difficult for people to even visualize
Speaker 2: what golf was like. I think one of the one
Speaker 2: of the one of the takeaways from the book, and
Speaker 2: I might be jumping head here a little bit. But
Speaker 2: one of the takeaways for the book for me as
Speaker 2: a golf course architect was how we look at a
Speaker 2: golf course now. So one of the ways that we
Speaker 2: look at golf courses now is to do with greens.
Speaker 2: You know, you'll think of a golf course and you go, boy,
Speaker 2: the greens are fantastic, you know, rolling, really smooth. Maybe
Speaker 2: they had maybe they were pretty flat, or maybe they
Speaker 2: had quite a lot of contour change, whatever they might have.
Speaker 2: We talk about the greens a lot. You look at
Speaker 2: St Andrews and you look back to those early plans,
Speaker 2: there is almost no mention of the greens. Some some mentioned,
Speaker 2: you know, certainly when they got into double greens, there
Speaker 2: was talk about that, but there's no real detailed plans
Speaker 2: of the greens. But what there were were detailed plans
Speaker 2: of the bunkers, you know, eighteen thirty six and was
Speaker 2: the second main plan. Very you know, they're getting into
Speaker 2: the detailed look at the bunkers, and other courses around
Speaker 2: Scotland and the UK were doing the same thing. You know,
Speaker 2: you could talk about Pandemonium, the bunker that was at Muscleborough,
Speaker 2: or you could go over to the Alps at Presswork
Speaker 2: or you could go down to you know, Ross and George'
Speaker 2: or wherever, and they were talking about the hazards and
Speaker 2: how difficult they were, and they were proud of that.
Speaker 2: It was almost like that's how they compared golf courses,
Speaker 2: not to do with greens. So that's kind of an
Speaker 2: interesting takeaway that you know, we've moved a long way from.
Speaker 2: I mean, hazard's still important, obviously, and but they're not
Speaker 2: They're not the defining factor. They're not you know, they're
Speaker 2: not swaying people one way or another in terms of
Speaker 2: where they're going to go on plane next. It's not
Speaker 2: a bell Weather sort of thing. And actually, I mean
Speaker 2: you could you could widen that out and talk about
Speaker 2: you know, us as humans, right, we're made up of
Speaker 2: I think they, I think the scientists think that human
Speaker 2: body is made up of about fifty nine different elements,
Speaker 2: which in there there are in their own right and
Speaker 2: not really very important. You know, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, you know,
Speaker 2: I think we're sixty percent oxygen. Now obviously most of
Speaker 2: that's mixed with hydrogen so it turns into water. But
Speaker 2: each of those elements is not particularly important until you
Speaker 2: put it together in the form of a human and
Speaker 2: that is really important. And the old course is a
Speaker 2: bit the same that the elements are not not particularly important.
Speaker 2: A reveted bunker here, a tea there, you know, a
Speaker 2: green over there, wall there, gorse here, individually don't really
Speaker 2: mean much. But it's the way that they're combined in St.
Speaker 2: Andrews on the signe on the sand with the wind
Speaker 2: that you have turned it into this just increable golf course,
Speaker 2: you know, And that's why it can never be replicated.
Speaker 2: You know, you could never think, well, you know, people
Speaker 2: have tried, you know, we're just going to build you know,
Speaker 2: the seventeenth hole, that we're going to build the eleventh
Speaker 2: hole and do that. Well, they never played the same.
Speaker 2: So yeah, there's I think there's broader takeaways with the whole,
Speaker 2: with the whole experience of s Andrew's that make it
Speaker 2: so unique, and I hope that comes out in the book,
Speaker 2: that we dive into the details. But ultimately it's the
Speaker 2: overall picture that gives us this just most incredible place.
Speaker 3: And that overall picture has really evolved over time, starting
Speaker 3: with that course you were talking about earlier, which didn't
Speaker 3: really have distinguished greens or distinguished fair ways or distinguished
Speaker 3: teas for that matter, those evolved at a particular point
Speaker 3: in the course's history. And so I think that one
Speaker 3: thing that people need to adjust their perspective about when
Speaker 3: they think about the early Old Course is that it's
Speaker 3: not like we draw golf holes now. When we draw
Speaker 3: golf holes now, we draw a little tea, we draw
Speaker 3: a fairway, and we draw a green. But the golf
Speaker 3: course wasn't understood that way, I don't think in the
Speaker 3: seventeen hundreds or even for much of the nineteenth century.
Speaker 3: And so that's just a very interesting thing to know
Speaker 3: and to remember. I'd like to get to the old
Speaker 3: Course as it was in sort of what we could
Speaker 3: call documented history, and that really starts in the early
Speaker 3: eighteen hundreds, eighteen twenties on. If you were to take
Speaker 3: a modern person and PLoP them down on the old
Speaker 3: course in the eighteen thirties, say before the Gutta Percha
Speaker 3: ball entered the picture and started to motivate some change,
Speaker 3: what would be the surprising thing, the most surprising thing
Speaker 3: to this person about what they would see on that
Speaker 3: golf links.
Speaker 1: That's great, and isn't it. If you were dropped from
Speaker 1: the moon, what would you what would you see or.
Speaker 3: Drop from the twenty first century, Right, you're a golfer
Speaker 3: in the twenty for a century. You're used to what
Speaker 3: golf courses look like now, or you're used to even
Speaker 3: what the old course looks like now. What would be
Speaker 3: surprising about that that earlier version of the documented old course?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would say that one of the things you'd
Speaker 2: noticed quite clearly is the lack of defined edges. So
Speaker 2: if we think of MOA's and what they do, they
Speaker 2: leave an edge, and you know that that wouldn't have
Speaker 2: happened because they just weren't there. Then they weren't. They
Speaker 2: weren't doing it in that sort of way. So I
Speaker 2: think you've got to almost imagine this place where grasses
Speaker 2: are longer and hairer, and there's a lot more of
Speaker 2: a blurred area, blurred perimeter between the different play zones.
Speaker 2: I often say to people, I see, you've got to
Speaker 2: think of golf in those older periods as a cross
Speaker 2: country adventure. There was a starting point and there was
Speaker 2: an endpoint, and there's really no definition in between. In
Speaker 2: the book and the very towards the end, I do
Speaker 2: a comparison between nineteen hundred golf and twenty twenty golf.
Speaker 2: And one of the difficult things in doing those side
Speaker 2: by side diagrams was trying to blur the trying to
Speaker 2: blur these edges, to not even define really where the
Speaker 2: green is. We have to, but it was trying to
Speaker 2: not show that, you know, I think there was I
Speaker 2: think there are critical periods, and you've chosen an interesting
Speaker 2: one there, and I move at about thirty years forward too.
Speaker 2: I tend to think that arguably the most important period
Speaker 2: and the evolution of the Old Course is between about
Speaker 2: eighteen fifty and eighteen seventy, and the gutt aperture was
Speaker 2: in play at that point. But what happened to the
Speaker 2: Old course was the double hole. The double greens came
Speaker 2: into play eighteen fifty six. Eighteen fifty seven, the RNA
Speaker 2: allowed that all the greens to have double holes cut
Speaker 2: in them that only been one prior to that. Because
Speaker 2: the game was growing in popularity, the railway just sort
Speaker 2: of started in Saint Andrews. There's a lot more people coming.
Speaker 2: I'm a busier golf course. Old Time returned to St.
Speaker 2: Andrews in eighteen sixty four, so then there's starting to
Speaker 2: be the expansion the building of the eighteenth Green the
Speaker 2: first Open Championship eighteen seventy three. You know, so I
Speaker 2: think there's a key prea there where it goes from
Speaker 2: that kind of ruggedy sort of golf course not you know,
Speaker 2: an you got to remember it's free, right, there's no
Speaker 2: green fees here. People just go and play golf as organized.
Speaker 3: Matches, no maintenance budget basically.
Speaker 2: No, that's right. So you know, it goes from that,
Speaker 2: and then and then I think it hits this. The
Speaker 2: RNA starts it, and it's to do with golf growing
Speaker 2: and popularity, and the train is a big and a
Speaker 2: big part of this picture bringing people into the town
Speaker 2: and parking them effectively right next to the seventeenth Green there.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and then old Time coming back and he
Speaker 2: does obviously incredible work on the conditioning of the golf course.
Speaker 2: You know, they're adding sand everywhere, starting to move flags around,
Speaker 2: taking holes out of play, you know, taking heather out,
Speaker 2: relaying with turf, just constantly increasing the quality of the
Speaker 2: links through that period right through then having the first
Speaker 2: the first Open in St.
Speaker 1: Andrews.
Speaker 2: So you've been going around since eighteen sixty, but that
Speaker 2: was the first one in St. Andrews and then right
Speaker 2: the way through. So for me and the book talks
Speaker 2: about it a little bit to new but it's a
Speaker 2: new addition to this book which new information we've found
Speaker 2: out since the first edition came out, which was to
Speaker 2: do what with the expansion of the area around the
Speaker 2: Swilken Burn the first Green, the seventeenth Green, and it
Speaker 2: had always been a mystery. It was a mystery to
Speaker 2: me until last year that we never quite knew how
Speaker 2: the first Green came to play, came into play, you know,
Speaker 2: we knew that there'd been a change, and the thought
Speaker 2: was that it was a green that was built a
Speaker 2: bit like the eighteenth Green was. It was an act.
Speaker 2: It was almost commissioned, and it was built and it
Speaker 2: was opened, and there was a date around that, whereas
Speaker 2: the first Green was it was never quite so clear.
Speaker 2: And I think what has happened now? And this came
Speaker 2: to light due to a court case to do with
Speaker 2: the Himalayas, a trespassing case to do with a man
Speaker 2: who felt that he could play on Himalayas at any
Speaker 2: time he liked, and actually he had a very good case.
Speaker 2: He ended up losing the court case. But what happened
Speaker 2: was we had we got ninety pages of testimonial from
Speaker 2: old Tom some of the leading players of the day
Speaker 2: the RNA, including washerwomen who were working in the b
Speaker 2: and you know, doing clean clothes in the burn. So
Speaker 2: we became we've got a very clear picture of kind
Speaker 2: of what was happening around that area. And I think
Speaker 2: the reality was that the first green evolved. There was
Speaker 2: the Secretary of the RNA at the time, at chat
Speaker 2: with Stuart Grace, gave evidence very early on and I
Speaker 2: think it was to a three day case that the
Speaker 2: new hole second hole in that double green was cut
Speaker 2: closer to the burn and towards the sea. So there's
Speaker 2: been some debate about whether the seventeenth Green was ever
Speaker 2: a double green, and for the first time we now
Speaker 2: know and we have it an evidence from the chap
Speaker 2: who was secretary from about eighteen forty two right through
Speaker 2: to this court case in the eighteen eighties. You know,
Speaker 2: he was in position for little over forty years, so
Speaker 2: from when the mandate was put in eighteen fifty six
Speaker 2: for the double greens right through to this court case.
Speaker 2: So yeah, he made it very clear that firstly that
Speaker 2: the seventeenth Green was a double green, and then we
Speaker 2: hear all this evidence about where the balls were landing,
Speaker 2: about the washing being laid out over the I say
Speaker 2: fairways out over that area and then being put on
Speaker 2: the gorse to dry. And it was the trampling effect
Speaker 2: really of these long agricultural grasses that started to repair
Speaker 2: what is now the first green area for becoming a green.
Speaker 2: And it was it was Tom Morris who took advantage
Speaker 2: of that when he was moving around and trying to
Speaker 2: look at player safety, ball strike issues with the seventeenth
Speaker 2: Green moving that green away. And I mean we even
Speaker 2: know at one point that first the first hole played
Speaker 2: as a part three. The hole wasn't even over the
Speaker 2: burn it was cut short of. But there was just
Speaker 2: a lot of change, you know, they weren't. We seem
Speaker 2: quite stuck now and kind of where holes are and
Speaker 2: where they need to play from and play too. There
Speaker 2: wasn't those restraints in that period between the eighteen fifty
Speaker 2: sixty seventies and until the right hand course got more
Speaker 2: established with the new T's right.
Speaker 3: So, Okay, there's a lot in there. There's a lot
Speaker 3: of detail here. What you're documenting is some of the
Speaker 3: changes that happened in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Speaker 3: I want to get a general picture of what was
Speaker 3: happening to the course at this time, because one surprising
Speaker 3: thing to this hypothetical modern person that might be plopped
Speaker 3: down on the old course as it was before the
Speaker 3: advent of the gut of percha ball and the coming
Speaker 3: of the railroad, one surprising thing to that person would
Speaker 3: be that the old course was a lot narrower back then,
Speaker 3: as in the playing area, the playing corridor was bordered
Speaker 3: by kind of wild grasses and gorse, and the space
Speaker 3: in which you could reasonably play your ball was narrower
Speaker 3: than it is now, and players would play essentially the
Speaker 3: same path out and back. They would play to the
Speaker 3: same holes. There weren't double greens yet, and so coming
Speaker 3: back you would play to the same hole that you
Speaker 3: had played to on the way out, on that particular green.
Speaker 3: So that changed over the course of the mid nineteenth century,
Speaker 3: and the course became more what it is now, very
Speaker 3: wide with these double greens and defined courses for going
Speaker 3: out and coming back. You don't come back on the
Speaker 3: same path that you go out. So how generally was
Speaker 3: that change made? Why was it made?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're right, absolutely right. I mean, it would have
Speaker 2: been a very narrow golf course originally, and so the
Speaker 2: widening of the golf course was a response to increase
Speaker 2: play popularity, ball safety and the you know, the key
Speaker 2: one of the key areas with the widening of the
Speaker 2: course was around that first eighteenth whole area as we
Speaker 2: know it today and the reclaiming of the first fairway
Speaker 2: from the sea, which took place over over a longer
Speaker 2: period sort of a mid eighteen hundreds to nineteen hundred,
Speaker 2: and the bruce Embankment was a big key part of that.
Speaker 2: It's really hard to imagine these days, but the sea
Speaker 2: that comes up if you've ever been to Saint Andrews,
Speaker 2: you know the RNA Clubhouse and up behind the clubhouse
Speaker 2: as a car park known so locally as the Museum
Speaker 2: car Park, Well that never existed, so that the sea
Speaker 2: which is there sort of sea World could have flowed
Speaker 2: up over the beach and kind of around that right
Speaker 2: hand side. So when that bruce Embankment came, that broke
Speaker 2: that opportunity for the sea to get through that area
Speaker 2: and reclaimed a significant amount of land. So that was
Speaker 2: a that was a really key part. But the widening
Speaker 2: of the golf course more broadly was due to popularity.
Speaker 2: And you know, the cleanest example to go is the
Speaker 2: fifth Fairway where previously they you know, the hole would
Speaker 2: have played up to the Lising Fields, which is the
Speaker 2: fourteenth fairway, and then you would have played across to
Speaker 2: what's the fifth green.
Speaker 3: You would have had to hit your drive across the
Speaker 3: hell Bunker. People who are familiar with that hell Bunker
Speaker 3: in its position on the now fourteenth hole, the old
Speaker 3: fifth Hall, which players at the time thought was a
Speaker 3: really great hole. You would have your drive over the
Speaker 3: hell Bunker and it was quite a carry back then
Speaker 3: it's kind of crazy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's right. So you had to cross it twice.
Speaker 2: You had you had had it over and up on
Speaker 2: the Elizaneth Fields and then as you went along you'd
Speaker 2: strike the beardies and then you'd have to go across
Speaker 2: the beardies to get on to you know, the fifth
Speaker 2: green or the watch is the double Green, and that
Speaker 2: was the first of the double greens, and you know,
Speaker 2: you start to think about the difficulty of that shot,
Speaker 2: you know, with Hickory clubs, with these gutty golf balls,
Speaker 2: potentially and you know what we have now and there
Speaker 2: was obviously the sandwich. You know, we'd talked about Jeane
Speaker 2: Sarahson earlier. Right, there was no sandwich in those days.
Speaker 2: So they had these clubs that they could get out with,
Speaker 2: but it was a lot more difficult, incredibly more difficult,
Speaker 2: you know, So you hear these stories of you know,
Speaker 2: guys going around hitting seventies, I think seventy seven, you know,
Speaker 2: course record young Tom Morris going around and doing it sequentially,
Speaker 2: you know, in the high seventies or maybe eighty. You think, oh,
Speaker 2: that's pretty good, but we're comparing with modern day technology
Speaker 2: and these wide fairways. Those were incredible scores in those
Speaker 2: days based on the difficulty. And of course coming back,
Speaker 2: you know, you'd be teeing off and the rules were changing.
Speaker 2: So part of the story is a constant changing of
Speaker 2: the rules. So originally, you know, you were sort of
Speaker 2: within a club length or two of the original hole,
Speaker 2: and then it went to four and then eight, six, twelve,
Speaker 2: and then ultimately that rule was changed and they could
Speaker 2: build teeing grounds. But if we go to that period
Speaker 2: when the rule was still within say, you know, eight
Speaker 2: club lengths of the whole, then from what we now
Speaker 2: know as the fourteenth hole. You're coming back across the beads,
Speaker 2: which are pretty much out of play on golf, but
Speaker 2: they would be to write and play then and on
Speaker 2: your line of play up to the listen fields, and
Speaker 2: then you've got to get over hell bunker and the
Speaker 2: other bunkers around it, and then and then get onto
Speaker 2: the green. So I mean, you're absolutely right, incredibly difficult game.
Speaker 2: And I don't think even today, I'll talk to people
Speaker 2: and say, look, it's very easy to think golf is
Speaker 2: a fairly easy game. You only need to go out
Speaker 2: to any golf course on any particular day and see
Speaker 2: how hard it is for most people to play and
Speaker 2: to play well. Well, you amplify that by ten times
Speaker 2: or more. And that's how you know Hickory golf would
Speaker 2: have been. But I think in that sort of nineteenth
Speaker 2: central period.
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Speaker 4: And now back to Scott McPherson.
Speaker 3: One striking realization I had as I was reading your
Speaker 3: book and looking at the evidence of what the course
Speaker 3: was like and how it turned into the course we're
Speaker 3: familiar with today is that a lot of the bunkers
Speaker 3: that we now know as kind of center line strategic hazards,
Speaker 3: there's room to play around them. If you're in them,
Speaker 3: you're not in good shape, but you can go to
Speaker 3: the side of them, play safely away from them, but
Speaker 3: you get a little reward if you play closer to them,
Speaker 3: and you can kind of shorten the hole or get
Speaker 3: a better angle or something like that. It's the classic
Speaker 3: idea of a strategic bunker. But on the early Old Course,
Speaker 3: a lot of these bunkers were effectively cross bunkers because
Speaker 3: the course was so narrow that these bunkers basically went
Speaker 3: all the way across them, so you couldn't play around them. Now,
Speaker 3: what happened with widening is that you could play around them,
Speaker 3: and a different sort of spirit of the old course emerged,
Speaker 3: one that the Golden Age architects like Alistair Mackenzie and
Speaker 3: Tom Simpson John Lowe really loved and thought was a feature,
Speaker 3: not a bug. But how did players initially receive this
Speaker 3: widening of the old course? Because surely it made the
Speaker 3: place easier to play, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that's great.
Speaker 2: So you know, John Lowe, incredible thinker of the game,
Speaker 2: editor wrote concerning golf one of the great golf books
Speaker 2: in my mind, so he was saying, and I think
Speaker 2: his quote was, golf is a contest of risk. So
Speaker 2: if you think about what that actually means. It means
Speaker 2: that in every shot you're having to balance you know,
Speaker 2: your ability versus the weather, versus the course and the
Speaker 2: hazards and the result. So those center line hazards is
Speaker 2: the example of say, having to get as close as
Speaker 2: you can.
Speaker 1: To risk going in them.
Speaker 2: In order to get some type of reward and easier
Speaker 2: angle to the whole the shorter line, whatever it might
Speaker 2: have been. It's that contest of risk, which I think
Speaker 2: is one of the things that separates golf from all
Speaker 2: other sports because it's ever present. So, you know, there
Speaker 2: was a period of time and you look at the
Speaker 2: evilue in the old course when the ball was going
Speaker 2: further and further astray and maybe it wasn't getting into
Speaker 2: trouble as much of maybe some people on the RNA
Speaker 2: committees at the time were hoping to. So there was
Speaker 2: this increase in the amount of bunkering along the periphery
Speaker 2: of the golf course, which may not have been prevalent
Speaker 2: in that nineteenth century earlier mid nineteenth century period. And
Speaker 2: I you know, it's still there today and it's well
Speaker 2: documented in my book. But I don't think those are
Speaker 2: the key bunkers. I think we still come back to
Speaker 2: those central bunkers. It could be you know, Principal's nose,
Speaker 2: you know, as another example. But the end whole bunkers,
Speaker 2: even on nine, you know, is still in play because
Speaker 2: you don't really want to be down the side. So
Speaker 2: there are some newer bunkers, which is still central bunkers.
Speaker 2: But you know, cheaps bunker was always a great target.
Speaker 2: You know, the flag was never down the right hand
Speaker 2: side that we see it now. It was always up
Speaker 2: on tops needed to get left in order to have
Speaker 2: a better angle in. But yeah, if you think about
Speaker 2: it in that sort of way, that as a contest
Speaker 2: of risk, and that the best position bunkers make the
Speaker 2: game more interesting, then I think you're starting to understand
Speaker 2: the real essence of what the old course is.
Speaker 3: And what's so interesting is that that real essence that
Speaker 3: we understand now about the old course. The reason we
Speaker 3: think it's such a great course because of its width
Speaker 3: and its strategic hazards and this contest of risk that
Speaker 3: you mentioned earlier that evolved that wasn't there from the beginning.
Speaker 3: The course took on its width because of this response
Speaker 3: to the increased popularity, and it just happened that it
Speaker 3: turned the course into something different. I just find that
Speaker 3: completely fascinating. This wasn't necessarily by design. It just evolved
Speaker 3: this way and people realized once it happened, Wow, this
Speaker 3: is great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's an interesting commison.
Speaker 2: You know, if you're sitting in the sitting in the
Speaker 2: pub with your friends, right and you say, well, actually,
Speaker 2: even if the gold golf course who was say, two
Speaker 2: or three times wider again than what it is now,
Speaker 2: it wouldn't really make a big difference to the playing
Speaker 2: of the course because you actually still have to come
Speaker 2: back to the middle. You know, in life, you could
Speaker 2: probably live your life on the fringes, and certainly in
Speaker 2: terms of our justice system, the further you head off line,
Speaker 2: you know, the greater the punishment once you end up
Speaker 2: in front of a judge. But in golf you can't
Speaker 2: really do that. You still have to you have to
Speaker 2: come back to the green. The green is in the
Speaker 2: middle of You've got to come back at some point.
Speaker 2: So yeah, this idea that we target the preferred line
Speaker 2: of play, the desire line, has to be the central
Speaker 2: essence of really good golf course design, you know, And
Speaker 2: that's what I mean That's why the Old Course is
Speaker 2: such a great place to learn from, right for anybody
Speaker 2: and anybody interested in golf course design or architecture. You
Speaker 2: know what what is it separates this course from you know,
Speaker 2: apart from the fact that I mean another that's probably
Speaker 2: another discussion for down the pub is you know, all
Speaker 2: the greatest golfers of all time have played the old course.
Speaker 2: I mean, I can think of one great golfer who
Speaker 2: i'd call a great golfer who's not played the golf
Speaker 2: course the old course is Ben Hogan, you know, never
Speaker 2: never got to Sir Andrews, and I would say is
Speaker 2: a great But you know, with him to one side,
Speaker 2: it's tested every great golfer I can think of in
Speaker 2: the history of the game. And yet it's still providing
Speaker 2: a great test today. You can't say that about I
Speaker 2: don't think anywhere else.
Speaker 3: Now. Another thing that happened with the widening of the
Speaker 3: course is that it could start to be played both
Speaker 3: clockwise and counterclockwise. Now it's played almost exclusively counterclockwise. Are
Speaker 3: along the right hand route?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: Do we know how often the left hand route was
Speaker 3: used in the late eighteen hundreds, and it would have
Speaker 3: to be the late eighteen hundreds, because before there wasn't
Speaker 3: really a left and rate, but once there came to
Speaker 3: be the possibility of a left and rate, there were
Speaker 3: different ways that the players could go around the course.
Speaker 3: Do we have a sense of how popular the left
Speaker 3: hand route was and then how the right hand route
Speaker 3: came to be the preferred one?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it was. I mean it was pretty
Speaker 2: much a weekly thing. It would swap around that regularly.
Speaker 2: There was no preference for a long period of time.
Speaker 2: And really the change was just to do with spreading
Speaker 2: the wearer, you know, so that the divots are in
Speaker 2: different places between those periods.
Speaker 1: But what happened, and again we're going to.
Speaker 2: Come back to technology with this one, is as the
Speaker 2: new golf ball. So the gunner percha ball sort of
Speaker 2: came into play, and you know, the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: eighteen eighties came into play. It's starting to go further now.
Speaker 2: So people are getting a sense that the contests of
Speaker 2: risk might be changing. They want to try and get
Speaker 2: that back in play. So maybe we need some more tees. Okay,
Speaker 2: well where were going to put the tees? So now
Speaker 2: you have to make a decision, right, it's decision time
Speaker 2: we go left hand course or do we go right
Speaker 2: hand course. You can't do them both. So if you
Speaker 2: look at the routings for what they are, you know,
Speaker 2: the right hand course, as we know it's the right
Speaker 2: hand courses. The course we know today has only one crossing,
Speaker 2: one crossover where players crossover, so it's the seventh and
Speaker 2: the eleventh holes, whereas if you play the left hand
Speaker 2: course or the reverse course as we call it, there's
Speaker 2: two or three depending on how it's played. So from
Speaker 2: a safety point of view, that there's a greater element
Speaker 2: of risk. So I think it came down simply to
Speaker 2: that fact of why the right hand course was chosen
Speaker 2: to be extended and why it is now the open
Speaker 2: courses we know it was literally black and why as
Speaker 2: a safety related decision.
Speaker 3: Very interesting what could have been I guess you know,
Speaker 3: we wouldn't We wouldn't have the road hole as we
Speaker 3: understand it today. There are so many holes that would
Speaker 3: be different, and one of those crossovers that you mentioned
Speaker 3: would happen on the final hole of the course, I
Speaker 3: believe right, because the first hole would have to play
Speaker 3: across the Swolkenburn to the other side of the course
Speaker 3: to essentially the site of the road green that's an
Speaker 3: incredible first hole, and then to come back, of course,
Speaker 3: you would have to play from the area of I
Speaker 3: guess the second te to the eighteenth green that old
Speaker 3: Tom Morris built, and so it would just be a
Speaker 3: totally different course. People still occasionally play it today. The
Speaker 3: Links Trust offers some opportunities for people to do that,
Speaker 3: but it is more of a curiosity than it is
Speaker 3: something that people do as part of competition.
Speaker 1: I suppose, yeah, exactly. I mean lucky.
Speaker 2: I mean through the years that I've been here, they've
Speaker 2: opened it up a few times, and I've been lucky
Speaker 2: enough to play it a number of times. And I
Speaker 2: think next year, twenty twenty four, they're going to do
Speaker 2: it for three days, and it's great that I think
Speaker 2: people get that the chance to play it in the
Speaker 2: opposite way, and you know, you could argue there's probably
Speaker 2: a couple of holes which are maybe better in the
Speaker 2: reverse way. You know, playing twelve back up the hill
Speaker 2: makes more sense because you can see the bunkers. You
Speaker 2: can't see them when you play the way we play
Speaker 2: today on the right hand course.
Speaker 1: But you know, and you.
Speaker 2: Could hypothesize that you know, if they were in the
Speaker 2: eighteen eighties when they were starting to lengthen the t's
Speaker 2: and they wanted to get rid of that crossover between
Speaker 2: you know, on the first and eighteenth holes, they could
Speaker 2: have abandoned old Tom's new eighteenth green, which would have
Speaker 2: only been ten or fifteen years old, and built a
Speaker 2: new green you know, where the current first tee is.
Speaker 2: You know, they could have maybe done a workaround, but
Speaker 2: that's not where they were at at the time, and
Speaker 2: you know, I would probably argue that they made the
Speaker 2: right decision. Whether they had to make the decision, you know,
Speaker 2: whether you believe that technology has been good and the
Speaker 2: longer ball has been good as a different debate. You know,
Speaker 2: we kind of know that you know, round about nineteen
Speaker 2: hundred the old course was actually there was a big extension.
Speaker 2: They added about two hundred yards, but let's just say
Speaker 2: for round numbers period that at nineteen hundred it was
Speaker 2: six three hundred yards, which it was. You know, where
Speaker 2: we are today for the Open Championship last last year,
Speaker 2: we're over a thousand yards longer, you know, and there's
Speaker 2: been this push you know, more recently around two thousand,
Speaker 2: the new teams were put on areas that would have
Speaker 2: been considered outside the boundaries of the old course. So
Speaker 2: the second hole, it was put on the Himalayas. Once
Speaker 2: you get to thirteen it was on the Eden golf Course,
Speaker 2: and again coming back up seventeen was in the practice range.
Speaker 2: So they pushed outside the boundaries. But if you do
Speaker 2: a parallel and that's done that I do it in
Speaker 2: the book for fun. Fun, So the right word interest's
Speaker 2: sake as much as anything. If you look at the
Speaker 2: power of the ball where it was in nineteen hundred
Speaker 2: and where it was now, and what it would need
Speaker 2: to be, how long the old course would need to
Speaker 2: be in order to have that relative similarity in the
Speaker 2: old course would need to be about nine thousand yards
Speaker 2: long now and there's no way, of course, you know,
Speaker 2: there's no way you could find we could find another
Speaker 2: fifteen hundred or seventeen hundred yards to make it nine thousand,
Speaker 2: and I don't think actually it would be enjoyable. I
Speaker 2: think it would be a slog It would take away
Speaker 2: a lot of the nuance. But you know, back to
Speaker 2: your question about how would it play if we rolled
Speaker 2: the clock back, you know, one hundred and fifty years
Speaker 2: it's a really difficult game, and the ball's not going
Speaker 2: as far fare ways and narrow the grasses a while,
Speaker 2: the rabbits running around the hole has been worn out.
Speaker 2: There's no whole cups, you know, there's no tin cup
Speaker 2: in the middle of the hole. You know, it's golf,
Speaker 2: but not as we know it now.
Speaker 3: Something that you've mentioned a couple of times is the
Speaker 3: changing teeing grounds. This one way that the Old Course
Speaker 3: has been lengthened in response to technology. Really, the Haskell ball,
Speaker 3: which came about in the early nineteen hundreds was one
Speaker 3: of those moments that forced the Old Course to consider
Speaker 3: where else can we put these teeing grounds to extend
Speaker 3: the course and bring some of the key hazards back
Speaker 3: into play. But something that's so interesting about what you
Speaker 3: discovered about the changes at the Old Course in the
Speaker 3: mid eighteen hundreds is that teeing grounds weren't really a
Speaker 3: thing until a particular point in the course's evolution. You
Speaker 3: would simply take a certain number of club lengths from
Speaker 3: the hole and tee it up there. But at some point,
Speaker 3: and I believe it was old Tom Morris, they introduced
Speaker 3: distinct teeing areas and This strikes me as a really
Speaker 3: important moment in the evolution of golf course design in general,
Speaker 3: to think of the teeing area as a designed thing.
Speaker 3: So how did that happen at St. Andrew's And what
Speaker 3: was the significance of that move toward teeing grounds as
Speaker 3: opposed to just the sort of ad hoc teer it,
Speaker 3: you know, close to the hall.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a it's a thesis in its own right.
Speaker 2: And I'm not going to remember all the details. I
Speaker 2: need to dive back into the book as well, but yeah,
Speaker 2: certainly it was a It was the changes and the rules.
Speaker 2: So I think the idea if you can visualize the
Speaker 2: game getting really popular, and the idea of a group
Speaker 2: standing next to the hole waiting to tee off and
Speaker 2: problem and potentially waiting because there's a group in front
Speaker 2: of them, and now there's a group behind them trying
Speaker 2: to hit to that hole as well, and the area
Speaker 2: around the hole is becoming worn out because you know,
Speaker 2: you've got players and caddies. You know, the caddies get
Speaker 2: the ball out and then they take some sand and
Speaker 2: they build a little raised cup for the team for
Speaker 2: the player to tee off the gentleman goal for the
Speaker 2: tee off. These areas are getting really worn, so I
Speaker 2: think what was happening is an evolution of the rules
Speaker 2: to try and keep up right. Okay, we now need
Speaker 2: to move the place where the ball is teed further
Speaker 2: away from a current hole until it got to a
Speaker 2: point where you know, the rule was abandoned and that
Speaker 2: you could actually create these separate tea in grounds. I
Speaker 2: can't remember that the year off the top of my head,
Speaker 2: but what I think what we found on and it
Speaker 2: was kind of fun. On the right next to the
Speaker 2: thirteenth green is this area of you know, it's rectangular
Speaker 2: and it's level, and you know, I think it's one
Speaker 2: of the first te's that would have been would have happened,
Speaker 2: and old time would have built it in that sort
Speaker 2: of nineteenth century period. And it clearly shows on that
Speaker 2: whole hole which leads into the fourteenth hole of a seat,
Speaker 2: that the procession is back and right, and that's generally
Speaker 2: happened across the course. So as the ball's going further
Speaker 2: there's a new tea and it's further back and it's
Speaker 2: the right, and you know, that's one of the great
Speaker 2: things about the old course is we can use it.
Speaker 2: It's like looking at DNA, right, you know, this is
Speaker 2: how the game's developed, and we can see it and
Speaker 2: the proof of it here.
Speaker 3: That's such an interesting point that the expansion has happened
Speaker 3: back and rate, because if you think about it, the
Speaker 3: initial teeing ground for a hole would be sort of
Speaker 3: in the in the intuitive spot, which would be near
Speaker 3: the hole of the previous hole. But if you need
Speaker 3: to expand the course, you can't go into the middle
Speaker 3: of the course, so you need to go back and rate,
Speaker 3: and that changes some things about the holes.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, it does, so we touched on it earlier. Again,
Speaker 2: So if we think about the fourteenth hole, if you
Speaker 2: were currently teeing off on the thirteenth green to head
Speaker 2: up to the fourteenth green, right in your eye line,
Speaker 2: are those beards. Now as you go back and right,
Speaker 2: they move off that center line. They move left. They
Speaker 2: don't move obviously, but you move, you move right, and
Speaker 2: so therefore they are left, and so you lose strategy.
Speaker 2: And you know, you could look at the course and say, well,
Speaker 2: there are courses that are the holes that have become
Speaker 2: better because of that? Are the holes that have become
Speaker 2: maybe less challenging. I mean, I would argue that the
Speaker 2: fourteenth is one that's become less challenging because those beardies
Speaker 2: are simply not in play now. One thing that's changed
Speaker 2: is the wall has become out of bounds I think
Speaker 2: nineteen eleven. So you know, there's obviously a consciousness taking
Speaker 2: play where they say, okay, well, people playing plays now
Speaker 2: taking this way.
Speaker 1: What can we do maybe to keep it?
Speaker 2: But you know, and I'm not sure it's always easy
Speaker 2: to say this is better or worse, to have me
Speaker 2: black or white about it. I think there's examples where
Speaker 2: it is reasonably clear that would be one, but there's
Speaker 2: others where it's it's some far more nuanced conversation. And
Speaker 2: you know, are we in a better place than we were?
Speaker 2: I mean arguably yes. Have we lost some of the
Speaker 2: experience of those original golf Yes, possibly, but we're you know,
Speaker 2: you put on you know, we live in a modern
Speaker 2: world and we look at what they're doing, and I
Speaker 2: think what the book does is it really tries to
Speaker 2: follow the process. So if we look at the most
Speaker 2: recent Open Championship last year, incredible conditioning of the golf course,
Speaker 2: vast firm, dry conditions and the Links Trusted in the
Speaker 2: RNA just did a great job with the agronomy, but
Speaker 2: they're still looking to protect par right, so they're still
Speaker 2: looking at this overall scoring. So we know historically that
Speaker 2: length has a fairly minor impact on scoring, so it
Speaker 2: hasn't mattered that the old course has got longer and longer.
Speaker 2: If you look at scoring over that one hundred year period,
Speaker 2: it's decreasing, so it's probably kept it in check. You know,
Speaker 2: long golf course kept in check a little bit, but
Speaker 2: the old course has kept the score of the ability
Speaker 2: of the players who are getting bigger and stronger and
Speaker 2: having it further with better technology, is still able to
Speaker 2: keep scoring going on a downwards tjuctory. So therefore, you know,
Speaker 2: the RNA and the Links Trust have looked at other ways.
Speaker 2: So you know, it was the flattening of the bottom
Speaker 2: of the of the bunkets, so if you ran into
Speaker 2: a bunkie you might be up against an edge. It
Speaker 2: was the positioning of the whole closer to hazards. So
Speaker 2: on the as an example, and this is documented in
Speaker 2: the book. On the first Green, we knew from the
Speaker 2: previous open that they had three greens quite close to
Speaker 2: the Swulkan burn on on whole one and one of
Speaker 2: them was back one of the holes and one of
Speaker 2: the days, I think round three was cut back left.
Speaker 1: Well, it was a very.
Speaker 2: Similar configuration last year in twenty twenty three, three of
Speaker 2: them quite close to the burn and one further back,
Speaker 2: but the distance that they were to the burn was
Speaker 2: almost half, so instead of being twelve yards or thirteen
Speaker 2: yards from the burn, they were six and seven yards.
Speaker 2: So I think it's an indication that in order to
Speaker 2: try to protect some of the scoring, that had to
Speaker 2: move the position to places where putting is a more
Speaker 2: difficult or there's more more risk, contest of risk, you know,
Speaker 2: back to that again. So yeah, I think we're I
Speaker 2: think the course is changing, and I and it's and
Speaker 2: I stay away from this whole better or worse, because
Speaker 2: I think it's a I don't think you can look
Speaker 2: at it the way, but it's certainly a more nuanced conversation.
Speaker 1: And the result, you know, last year was fantastic.
Speaker 2: It was just incredible open and we got everything we
Speaker 2: wanted out of it, right, But yeah, it's it's just
Speaker 2: a very different golf course than it was, certainly in
Speaker 2: eighteen twenty one.
Speaker 3: And from what it was in the nineteen twenties. You
Speaker 3: know when when Alistair McKenzie drew that diagram of the
Speaker 3: fourteenth hole, probably from that old teeing position that you mentioned,
Speaker 3: where you can play out to the left, play out
Speaker 3: to the right, play down the middle. You have all
Speaker 3: these different options, and that's not as much the case
Speaker 3: because of the new teeing position back into the right.
Speaker 3: Another thing that's emerged at the Old Course more recently,
Speaker 3: really in the twenty first century, is the introduction of
Speaker 3: some rough right and the narrowing of some fairways with
Speaker 3: maintained rough What do you make of that change?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 3: I would describe you as very diplomatic and circumspect about
Speaker 3: better or worse right. You don't really get into those debates.
Speaker 3: From my perspective, I feel like the width of the
Speaker 3: old course that was discovered, the great discovery of the
Speaker 3: nineteenth century was that width and what it brought to
Speaker 3: the game. I don't know. It seems to me that
Speaker 3: the rough is taking a bit of that away.
Speaker 2: So so let's talk about those non fairway areas. And
Speaker 2: I think you have to include in that heather and gorse,
Speaker 2: because those are this floora that you're going to find
Speaker 2: along the way, depending you're.
Speaker 3: On generally farther out right, but not always, but generally
Speaker 3: there's usually the maintained rough and then yeah, past that
Speaker 3: there will be the more natural grasses and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, So you might encounter a long the way,
Speaker 2: but I would say there's been quite a change in
Speaker 2: that through the years.
Speaker 1: You know. Part of the recent research.
Speaker 2: I found, you know, Old Tom closed the ninth and
Speaker 2: tenth fairways for about six months and put a sign
Speaker 2: on the first t green I think, saying that they're
Speaker 2: closed while he took away all the heather and returfed
Speaker 2: the whole area. And so the the you know, the
Speaker 2: old courses continue to change, but I'd like to think
Speaker 2: that that those remain part of the foliaedge that's on
Speaker 2: the old course. I think it's important that there's a
Speaker 2: chance you're going to find a lie. Now, Heather is
Speaker 2: difficult because so many people, you know, going around the
Speaker 2: old course of the fifty two fifty five thousand rounds
Speaker 2: of golf for a year plus caddies, you know, you're
Speaker 2: getting a lot aware so and heather doesn't stand up
Speaker 2: to that.
Speaker 1: So well.
Speaker 2: One thing about the gorse that I've noticed is there's
Speaker 2: always been gorse, say behind the first green, you know,
Speaker 2: that's where when the washerwomen were there, they would lay
Speaker 2: there the blankets and the sheets on top of the
Speaker 2: gorse to dry. And earlier, earlier this year they took
Speaker 2: away kind of one of the last stands of gorse.
Speaker 2: So I was it actually a little bit sad to
Speaker 2: see that because I felt that there was a historic
Speaker 2: component to having some gorse in that area. The rough
Speaker 2: itself does change, you know, it goes through different growth patterns.
Speaker 2: It'll be thicker and it'll be thinner. They've certainly tried
Speaker 2: to manicure it in certain places for an Open Championship.
Speaker 2: You know, one thing it does from a playing point
Speaker 2: of view, if you're in the rough, you lose some control.
Speaker 2: So if their flags are tucked behind certain humps or hollows,
Speaker 2: then you know the ball is going to come out hotter.
Speaker 2: So therefore it's harder to get it close to those spots.
Speaker 2: So it makes sense for the golf course to be
Speaker 2: prepared in a way that will add that element of
Speaker 2: risk to for elite golfers at certain times of the year. Well,
Speaker 2: but you know, I think and it sometimes overlooked. I've
Speaker 2: got a son who's thirteen, and he's now played the
Speaker 2: Old Course a couple of times, and occasionally we've gone
Speaker 2: out and we've seen other kids. And one of the
Speaker 2: great I mean, it's really fantastic that literally kids can
Speaker 2: play the Old Course, you know, not physically, but they
Speaker 2: can get around, you know, and actually play pretty well
Speaker 2: because there are quite wide fairways and they can get
Speaker 2: it running.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: There still have to be a minimum handicapped and all
Speaker 2: that sort of stuff, but this is not like you know,
Speaker 2: you can go to some great championship courses. They're almost
Speaker 2: unplayable for normal people and certainly for kids who can
Speaker 2: only say carry it so far. But I just see
Speaker 2: it as one of the great virtues of the Links
Speaker 2: is that it's playable for every level of golfer age
Speaker 2: group wise, as long as a certain level of ability,
Speaker 2: and that includes the rough, the rough grasses and the
Speaker 2: heather and the gorse. So yeah, it's definitely a component.
Speaker 2: And I know that the RNA think really and the
Speaker 2: Links Trust think really deeply about how they manage that,
Speaker 2: but I think generally they've got it.
Speaker 1: They've got it right, you know.
Speaker 2: The other if you're thinking about and if you're trying
Speaker 2: to make a comparison in your mind about the old
Speaker 2: courses and how it's changed. One of the things to
Speaker 2: think about is the is the look of the bunkers.
Speaker 2: You know, they weren't revetted originally, right, they had these
Speaker 2: collapsed faces. And now you go there and every bunker
Speaker 2: there's one hundred and ten, half of which are named,
Speaker 2: but they're all revetted. And that's you know, the bunkers
Speaker 2: have quite a visual, strong visual impact on people that
Speaker 2: take away that take lots of photos, but they take
Speaker 2: away this image of what the bunkers were, but that's
Speaker 2: not what they were. You you could you could have
Speaker 2: a conversation around about that. Is that now what the
Speaker 2: gold course is? Is that just what we are now?
Speaker 2: Or could you ever reintroduce maybe a non revetted face.
Speaker 1: Could it go that way? We have a combination. I
Speaker 1: don't know.
Speaker 2: I mean, these are debates that the RNA links trusts have,
Speaker 2: But it's when you have it in a historical context
Speaker 2: to say, look, we haven't always been revetted. It definitely
Speaker 2: retains those faces. It offers a certain look. But is
Speaker 2: that are we now fixed in that position? You know,
Speaker 2: it's an interesting question.
Speaker 3: We're definitely less willing to consider drastic changes at courses
Speaker 3: like the Old Course than we were one hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty years ago. Certainly, you read about some of the
Speaker 3: things that happened at the Old Course, especially during Old
Speaker 3: Tom Morris's tenure there, and you just think, Wow, they
Speaker 3: were really free to go ahead and make some changes,
Speaker 3: to build a new green that's now the Eighteenth Green,
Speaker 3: to relocate entire holes. Basically, there was a kind of
Speaker 3: freedom of evolution that way that for a variety of reasons,
Speaker 3: we no longer seem capable of. So I want to
Speaker 3: I want to ask you a question that you yourself
Speaker 3: ask toward the beginning of the book that is related
Speaker 3: to what we're discussing here. It's a question that I
Speaker 3: don't think you necessarily come down and answer by the
Speaker 3: end of the book, but it's an interesting one to pose,
Speaker 3: and I wonder how you might go about answering it.
Speaker 3: The question is is man or nature most responsible for
Speaker 3: the making of the physical features on the Old Course.
Speaker 3: You've just been discussing the bunkers, right, and how those
Speaker 3: evolved is a bit of a mystery, But now they're
Speaker 3: certainly more formalized than they once were. You have the
Speaker 3: contours of the fair ways of the old Course, which
Speaker 3: have been there for a long long time. Nobody has
Speaker 3: necessarily intervened with those. But as your book documents, there's
Speaker 3: been quite a bit more intervention from the hand of man,
Speaker 3: certainly more intervention than people usually believe there has been
Speaker 3: at the old Course. So how would you answer that question?
Speaker 3: Is man or nature most responsible?
Speaker 2: It's a great question, right, And the answer is it's changing.
Speaker 2: So if we go back to two hundred years the
Speaker 2: hand of man was very limited, I would have thought
Speaker 2: in what the course is, and now it's greater to
Speaker 2: a large extent, and it all continued to be greater.
Speaker 2: So we go back to you know, what are the elements?
Speaker 2: You know there were bunkers there, well, there were sandy
Speaker 2: areas and by the way, regarding by because I don't
Speaker 2: have a view on it necessarily, but I think those
Speaker 2: those are interesting conversations that need to be have within
Speaker 2: historical context. So again with what you're what you're what
Speaker 2: you're asking, it's it's not quantifiable to say one or
Speaker 2: the other. It's a combination. So I would say at
Speaker 2: the moment and every year we go forward. There is
Speaker 2: a greater element of human intervention in the Old Course.
Speaker 2: There has to be, because they have to maintain certain areas,
Speaker 2: and it might be just a little bit here and
Speaker 2: a little bit there, but that's therefore a change from
Speaker 2: it's say, a natural if we just think about the
Speaker 2: broken ground, the humps and hollows, most of those we'd
Speaker 2: like to think fairly natural, and they probably and we're
Speaker 2: probably right. But every time something has changed, it's another
Speaker 2: half a percent, quarter of a percent, one percent, you know,
Speaker 2: of the Old Course being touched or changed or in
Speaker 2: some way manipulated by human intervention or machine. So you know,
Speaker 2: at what point do you think we've gone too far?
Speaker 2: You can never really wrap something in plastic like this.
Speaker 2: You could never seal it and say that's it. It's
Speaker 2: never going to change, because it will. There'll be an
Speaker 2: open they'll put up another TV tower, somebody will have
Speaker 2: to put some foot stands in there for it to
Speaker 2: be it's another spade in the ground that's changing another
Speaker 2: little bit. But I think that I like to think
Speaker 2: that generally the RNA and the Links Trust have the
Speaker 2: best interests of the Old Course at heart. That's the
Speaker 2: golden goose, right, don't want to kill the golden goose.
Speaker 2: It is the way the ball runs on this broken ground.
Speaker 2: It's the running ball. So I think they're aware, acutely
Speaker 2: aware that they need to make sure that really things
Speaker 2: don't change, and there has to be a very good limit.
Speaker 2: The watermark has to be incredibly high for them to
Speaker 2: make a change, because not only is it important, more
Speaker 2: people are watching than ever before. I don't think, you know,
Speaker 2: even when I did my first edition, it was quite
Speaker 2: hard even to get aerial photographs. Now there's drone photography everything,
Speaker 2: everything's mapped. You know, you could see if there was
Speaker 2: if there was a change, and there'll be questions to
Speaker 2: be asked.
Speaker 1: By you know who.
Speaker 2: Those are, those who are in charge to say to
Speaker 2: try and have to give very plausible reasons about why
Speaker 2: this is required. And I think previously they've been talk
Speaker 2: about maybe doing this or maybe doing that, and for
Speaker 2: one reason or another it had been turned down, and
Speaker 2: I think probably rightly so, So I think I think
Speaker 2: it's becoming increasingly difficult to do any changes. But I
Speaker 2: think it's a myth if people think that everything out
Speaker 2: there is done by you know, nature. Increasingly there is
Speaker 2: small bits that are changing, and I just hope we
Speaker 2: get to a point where and this will come back
Speaker 2: to technology. And I'm very supportive of the RNA's move
Speaker 2: to try and restrict the golf ball because it is
Speaker 2: places like Andrews that I think tend to suffer. So
Speaker 2: without that some type of change to the golf ball
Speaker 2: and the equipment, then these places become increasingly at risk
Speaker 2: of further change.
Speaker 1: Scott.
Speaker 3: I think that's a good place to wrap up. I'm
Speaker 3: going through in my head all of the fascinating things
Speaker 3: in your book that we did not talk about, and
Speaker 3: I feel a little bit regretful about that, but I
Speaker 3: would definitely point people to your book. There's so much
Speaker 3: in there that we didn't cover in this episode. And
Speaker 3: you know, it's a book that I that's going to
Speaker 3: be on my shelf and I'll pull it out frequently.
Speaker 3: So could you tell people how they might get a
Speaker 3: hold of a copy of this book?
Speaker 2: Great, Yeah, I mean it's not widely available. There's a
Speaker 2: couple of shops in St. Andrews if you're visiting St Andrew's,
Speaker 2: or the easiest way is to order through my website.
Speaker 1: Scott.
Speaker 2: Scott Macpherson goolf Design dot com. And I think what
Speaker 2: I want to say about the book is that it's
Speaker 2: you know, it's a coffee table style book. It's full
Speaker 2: of great photography of the Old Course, but effectively, like
Speaker 2: you've found out, it's a research book. You know, people
Speaker 2: can dip in and dip out and if you're making it,
Speaker 2: certainly if you're making a visit to St Andrews and
Speaker 2: they'll put you on good stead to learn how the
Speaker 2: Old Course has evolved over the last two hundred years.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much, Thank.
Speaker 4: You, Thank you for listening to another edition of the
Speaker 4: Friday Golf Podcast. That was Garrett Morrison. I'm andy last
Speaker 4: time you're going to hear from me on this podcast.
Speaker 4: This episode was edited and produced by Matt Rush's Thank you, Matt.
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